Radeon HD 3870 512MB vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M290X, which features a clock speed of 850 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		106 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (6%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 M290X should theoretically be a lot better than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 96000 (167%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be much (about 448%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3870 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 55600 (448%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3870 512MB		12400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 14800 (119%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.